Miami Event and NYC Chelsea Galleries Short List
Artview NYC Miami Event for the Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach
Visit Art Miami & PULSE 2011: Art Basel Satellite Shows with Lacy Davisson Doyle on Friday, Dec 2, 2011. Reservations required.
Call (561) 805-8562 or e-mail campus@fourarts.org to make reservations.
Basking in the Miami glow from last year, Lacy Davisson Doyle, art historian, contemporary art advisor, and member of the International Association of Professional Art Advisors returns to lead us on a walking tour through two of Art Basel’s finest satellite shows: Art Miami and PULSE.
Miami’s premiere anchor fair, Art Miami kicks off on the opening day of Art Week–the first week of December when thousands of collectors, dealers, curators, and artists descend upon Miami to experience the string of contemporary and high-energy fairs for which the city is known. Celebrating its 22nd edition, Art Miami is distinguished for its depth, diversity and quality, showcasing the best in modern and contemporary art from over 100 international art galleries and prominent art institutions.
PULSE Contemporary Art Fair is the leading U.S. art fair dedicated solely to contemporary art. Held annually in New York and Miami, PULSE bridges the gap between main stream and alternative fairs, providing participating galleries a platform to present new works to a strong and growing audience of collectors, art professionals and art lovers.
NYC Chelsea Galleries – Short List
By Lacy Davisson Doyle and Lucy Bamman
Melissa Meyer and Boo Ritson at BravinLee Programs, 526 W 26 Street
Just Painting by Melissa Meyer made specifically for the gallery’s book program. This handmade book that consists of twelve luminous abstract watercolors on 100 percent rag paper builds on Meyer’s past work. She combines visual structure with fluidity and finds influence in the art of dance, the structure of architecture the tonal qualities of film noir and the gestural movement of actors. This show is in collaboration with Lennon Weinberg Gallery NYC where Meyer exhibited new paintings and watercolors.
Also on view at BravinLee Programs is Boo Ritson‘s exhibition, All Aboard. Defying simple categorization, Ritson’s work straddles the realms of painting, sculpture, performance and photography. Ritson conceives a character and costumes the model/sitter. She then paints directly on the sitter’s exposed skin and costume before documenting the result photographically. The exhibition includes two works that are part of a new thread of work in which Ritson uses the popular Lookie-loo motif, in which a sitter places his head in a hole cut atop a painted figure scene backdrop.
Joan Mitchell at Cheim & Read, 547 W 25 Street
Cheim & Read has brought together works, dating from 1985-1992, that represent Joan Mitchell‘s exploration of painting in the last decade of her life. While the artist’s late work still evinces a distinct confidence of gesture and mark-making, it is further characterized by an increased sense of freedom. Often presented in diptych format, Mitchell’s expansive late canvases remain evocative of the landscape, but also provide room to explore a more liberated mark. Brushstrokes are energetic and colors vivid. Punctuated by airy, unpainted areas of canvas, the paintings express a sensation of urgency and immediacy, as if in rejection, denial and resistance to her failing health. Through her late work, she strived for immortality, for a merging with the timelessness and formlessness of nature.
Richard Serra at Gagosian Gallery, 555 W 24 Street
On view at Gagosian Gallery are two of Richard Serra‘s newest sculptures. The artist has pushed the unique sculptural syntax that he developed over the last fifteen years to arrive at entirely new forms in two of his most complex and challenging works to date. Throughout his groundbreaking career, Serra’s sculptures have been celebrated with retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The MMA show is currently on view at SFMOMA, it will also travel to the Menil Collection in Houston. The artist considers “space to be a material,” and has spent his career proving this belief using sculptural form.
Richard Serra at Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Weyl, 465 W 23 Street
In November 2010, Richard Serra began his most recent collaboration with Gemini G.E.L. on two series of prints – Bight and Ballast. Bight and Ballast continue the artist’s two-dimensional examination of mass and weight in a small scale, with highly textured and saturated surfaces that have come to define Richard Serra’s print work. Serra has been making prints at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles for almost forty years. Known for his monumental steel sculptures, Serra has increasingly worked in a larger scale as a printmaker, yet after completing some of his largest prints ever at Gemini (the 2008-2010 Weights and Levels), the artist chose to revisit printmaking on a relatively small-scale.
Marc Dennis at Hasted Kraeutler, 537 W 24 Street
Marc Dennis paints hyper-realistic and strikingly detailed paintings addressing notions of subversive desire, pleasure, and beauty. The artist lures us into the spectacle of subtly staged and slightly voyeuristic worlds of contemporary American culture. Interested in the transformative possibilities of familiar iconic images, such as guns, meat, jewelry, and assorted material possessions, Dennis explores the charged subjects of decadence, death, power, and sexuality. The artist currently lives and works between Brooklyn and Ithaca, New York.
Friedel Dzubas & Roberto Caracciolo at Loretta Howard Gallery, 525-531 W 26 Street
While Friedel Dzubas‘ earlier works bear the hallmarks of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, by the 1960s the artist had begun to empty and simplify his canvases. The large-scale paintings on view in the Loretta Howard Gallery’s exhibition trace the artist’s trajectory from frenetic brushwork to diffuse color. As the artist continued to empty and simplify his picture plane his treatment of movement shifted from one of illustration to suggestion. Determined to “let color speak as directly as possible” the artist began to explore a combination of minimal forms, awash in negative space. By the 1970s these forms appear as if caught in arrested motion, a still frame of dramatic color.
Roberto Caracciolo‘s square canvases take the modernist grid as their starting point. Like Mondrian before him the artist suggests the grid as a framework, something to be transmuted by the artist. His painterly marks do not simply float against negative space but become part of a dynamic structure of color. The artist has created a matrix for reflection and examination, where paint is caught in motion across carefully constructed space. The paintings function as a poem set in the key of one color.
Yoko Ono at Galerie Lelong, 528 W 26 Street
An installation of doors and figurative transparent sculptures form the nucleus of multi-media artist Yoko Ono‘s second solo exhibition at Galerie Lelong, UNCURSED. Ono says, “When we were children, we learnt at our elementary school how the warrior, Shikanosuke Yamanaka, vowed to endure seven misfortunes and eight sufferings, thereby giving all the negative things to him that would have been given to the people of his city… Much later, I wondered if it would not be better to ask for seven good fortunes and eight treasures…which I promptly did. In my recent exhibition THE ROAD OF HOPE in Hiroshima… I offered blessings to the people of Hiroshima and prayed that they would be given seven good fortunes and eight treasures.” Ono now envisions these same blessings for New York as a reminder of our global connectedness and the universality of human experience to “uncurse” ourselves and move on.
Nan Goldin at Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 W 22 Street
Nan Goldin‘s exhibition includes the U.S. debut of Scopophilia, a new 25-minute-long slide installation commissioned last year by the Louvre Museum. Scopophilia pairs the artist’s own autobiographical images with new photographs of paintings and sculpture from the Louvre’s collection. Organized around themes of love and desire, Scopophilia, which means “the love of looking,” reflects on Goldin’s intensely personal photographs, as well as the unique permission given to the artist to photograph freely throughout the Louvre Museum. Of this project, Goldin explains, “Desire awoken by images is the project’s true starting point. It is about the idea of taking.